Design of a supervisory predictive controller and its application to thermal power plants

The optimization at supervisory level of thermal power plant controls is investigated. The design of a predictive supervisory controller that optimizes an objective function in order to determine the set-points for a given regulatory level is described. The objective function includes both an economic criterion and a regulatory criterion. The proposed supervisory controller is applied to the gas turbine of a thermal power plant and it is compared with the control strategy for constant optimum set-points.